November 2, 2025
From hobby to hostage
A prison of my own making
When a hobby becomes handcuffs — commenters yell 'just build it'
TLDR: A homelabber realizes their rules turned a hobby into stress and decides to go simple. Comments mix tough love (“just build”), empathy (“me too”), and a FreeBSD fix, sparking a lively debate about joy vs perfection.
A homelabber just confessed they turned their safe, tinkering space into a self‑made prison by piling on “best practices” — code‑everything rules, huge container systems, CI/CD (automatic build/deploy) and even an “immutable” laptop you can’t easily change. Result: simple tasks felt like paperwork. Their fix? Smash the purity police, go back to cron scripts (scheduled shell jobs), install things the easy way, and rediscover joy. One commenter, sivers, dropped a lifeline and a vibe shift: try FreeBSD for fun again — link here.
The comments exploded into therapy with a roast. jackblemming served tough love — “usually it’s a simple blog generator” — and added a raised‑brow “Hope it works out for her,” sparking side‑eye. mberning joked the homelab turned into a Fortune 500 IT job. npodbielski blew the airhorn: “this guy need some help!” Meanwhile, aster0id confessed they did the same, cramming big‑company tooling into tiny projects and getting tangled in free tier chaos. Memes flew: “Kubernetes for a grocery list,” “machines as cattle, not pets,” and the new mantra, “purity is a sin.” The crowd split between just ship it minimalists and process brings comfort loyalists, with surprising nostalgia cheering the FreeBSD path like a tech spa day. Drama level: high; takeaway: joy beats perfection
Key Points
- •The author’s homelab became overwhelming due to strict adherence to declarative, immutable, and automated DevOps practices.
- •Simple tasks, like trying software or creating a quick file share, felt blocked by requirements to containerize, use Kubernetes, and commit manifests to Git.
- •Fedora Silverblue’s immutability complicated app installation, requiring Flatpak, distrobox, or layered packages with reboots.
- •Managing a Nix-based home server led to broken rebuilds and occasional nixpkgs bugs after updates.
- •The author plans to simplify by avoiding immutable distros, using tools only where they help, replacing CI/CD with cron scripts, favoring easy installs, and accepting non-declarative state with backups.